Does anyone have a list of these? These local buses came out mostly in 1991-92 on 386/486 boards before the VESA Local Bus standard was finalized. My research doesn't come up with much, particularly pictures of the slots and boards. The only one I know of that seemed somewhat popular is the Opti Local Bus, which used the EISA edge connector. The only card that seemed to be made for it is a Tseng ET4000AX based video card.
There are also a few "BC3486UL" motherboards on ebay with a single EISA looking slot, but with a UMC chipset that may or may not be yet another one of these non-standard buses.
The reason I ask is the video card likely uses the ET4000AX and the SCSI card is using the same host adapter chip Adaptec's ISA cards use. I don't think either chip can completely take advantage of a 32-bit interface.
The ET4000AX should have supported local buses natively. No comment on the adaptec chip on the SCSI card....surely it had to have been better in some ways though.
edit: I see ET4000AX only has a 16-bit host interface. It should still see a big boost due to running at local bus speeds though (33MHz)
I just mentioned this in another thread and ran across this thread searching for details on the OPTI local bus, but I ran a system in 1994 that used the Chips & Technologies WINGINE local bus. Here's my write up and note the engineer on the project in comments on the post.
I just mentioned this in another thread and ran across this thread searching for details on the OPTI local bus, but I ran a system in 1994 that used the Chips & Technologies WINGINE local bus. Here's my write up and note the engineer on the project in comments on the post.
There's not much to know really. It's pretty much like Vesa Local Bus, but it has a different connector. It slightly predates VLB, but it failed and therefore not many cards were made for it.
While browsing some old hardware magazines and forums, I collected some informative facts about proprietary local bus hardware:
First available mainboard providing a local bus was the "486 Superboard" by Orchid in early 1992.
It featured an Opti Chipset and an EISA-style local bus connector called "convertible slot".
This "Orchid local bus" or "Opti local bus" design was adopted by many other manufacturers.
First available graphics cards by Orchid were called "Fahrenheit 1280°D" (S3 911) and "Prodesigner IIsD" (ET4000AX). Several clone cards with these chips were made. Later, an IDE caching controller was also available, the "Tekram DC-660"
Gigabyte featured the "GA-486US" mainboard using two consecutive 16 bit ISA slots for local bus interconnection.
Available cards were "GA-200" (ET4000AX), "GA-300" (S3 911) and "GA-400" (SCSI)
ECS Elitegroup offered local buses on their "UL486" and "FX-3000" a.k.a "US3486" motherboards using the 112-pin MCA slot we all know from the later VLB.
But ECS's implementation is not VESA compatible and unfortunately visually not distinguishable!
Suitable cards for the "ECS local bus": "VI-811" (ET4000AX) and "VI-911" (S3 911)
Chips & Technologies offered a "Wingine local bus" on their 82C4021 chipset based motherboards for their
Wingine F64200 DGX Accelerator cards. These motherboards also had one VLB compatible slot.
Another different local bus connection was used by Joindata with motherboard models "G486PEL" and "G486PLB"
Peripheral cards are "G-HOSTS3" (s3 911) and "G-HOST4000" (ET4000)
There are more proprietary sytems like the Hauppauge 486M, NEC "Optibus", but it is nearly nothing is known about them.
re. Joindata local bus cards: I actually do have an example of a Joindata G-HOST4000 that I acquired from eBay fairly recently as part of a lot of five vintage video cards (the rest being ISA). Seller mistakenly sold it as a regular VLB card, but he also messaged me after the auction ended saying that it was a rare card. After noting that it didn't quite fit in my VLB 486 system, I'd say he was right on the card being rare. Of course, I don't have the right mobo to go with this card, so I don't even know if it works. Here's a picture of it:
So that explains the non functioning slot on the FX 3000D, eh?
This is a pretty interesting post. I knew about some of these proprietary local buses, but the ones from Joindata and ECS are new to me. The ECS slot is particularly troublesome, since you'd have no damn way of knowing if you have one or not.
Last edited by Anonymous Coward on 2015-12-03, 07:50. Edited 1 time in total.
There must have been warehouses of 16-bit MCA slots laying around for all these buses to recycle them. The Joindata board is using the 16-bit MCA Aux Video Extension slot.
So that explains the non functioning slot on the FX 3000D, eh?
This is a pretty interesting post. I knew about some of these proprietary local buses, but the ones from Joindata and ECS are new to me. The ECS slot is particularly troublesome, since you'd have no damn way of knowing if you have one or not.
Little necro here...
Discovered the hard way my ECS SL486E with EISA and something that looked like VLB definitely wasn't VLB. Simple way to determine: insert VLB card and it shorts the board out completely - unless it's a cheapo multi I/O card, in which case the system boots but the card starts to smoke 😮
Amazingly, both motherboard and VLB cards (including the smoking one) survived that. No idea what happens the other way round, but I fear it would also short out, probably leading unwitting owners to bin the ECS local bus cards as dead. Distinct feeling they're unobtainium by now 😢
Last edited by dionb on 2019-03-13, 09:40. Edited 1 time in total.